Roman Oxfordshire
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ROMAN OXFORDSHIRE Paul Booth January 2009 Research Background Roman Oxfordshire has been relatively well served by works of synthesis. Leaving aside antiquarian accounts (for which see Henig and Booth 2000, 202-221), the county benefited from the relatively late appearance of Volume 1 of the Victoria County History , in 1939 (Taylor et al . 1939); the summary of Roman archaeology presented there was able to take account of pioneering work in aerial photography and of excavations such as Radford’s work at Ditchley, as well as containing the typical gazetteer. The corresponding volume for Berkshire, covering much of what is now the Vale of the White Horse District of Oxfordshire, was of that earlier generation (1904) and is accordingly less useful, but a later survey, Peake’s The archaeology of Berkshire (1931), took account of subsequent work. Post-war summaries of Roman Oxfordshire were quite concise (Taylor 1954; Young 1986) and the first modern full- length survey is that of Henig and Booth (2000), following on from Peter Salway’s Tom Hassall Lecture of 1997 (Salway 1999). With the greatly increased volume of evidence available Roman Oxfordshire was inevitably a work of summary throughout, dispensing with the gazetteer approach of the VCH. Short summaries have also dealt with localised areas of the county (eg Booth 1998; 2001a; Copeland 2002). Although these generally add little in terms of new data they do provide a closer focus on the areas concerned. Most recently the Thames Valley area of the county has been subject to further review in an English Heritage (Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund) backed project entitled The Thames Through Time, examining the whole of the Upper and Middle Thames Valley region (but taking a very geographically-restricted view of the valley) through the first millennium AD. The draft text of this synthesis was submitted in February 2006 (Booth et al . forthcoming). There have also been reviews of particular aspects of the archaeology of Roman Oxfordshire, of which the most significant have dealt with the pottery industry (Young 1977) and rural settlement (Miles 1982). Oxfordshire is notable for early antiquarian involvement in villa sites such as Stonesfield and North Leigh, but systematic excavation of Roman sites in the county, with the exception of Atkinson’s pre-First World War work at Lowbury Hill (Atkinson 1916), did not begin until the 1920s, with the work of Hawkes and others at Alchester (Hawkes 1927; Iliffe 1929; 1932). The scale of such excavation remained generally small, despite the extent of destruction caused for example by gravel quarrying, until the 1970s. Thereafter the emphasis of intrusive fieldwork shifted almost entirely to threat-led work, the excavations of Brodribb et al . at Shakenoak (see below) being the only significant exception in the 60s and 70s. The formation of the Oxford Archaeological Unit in 1973 (see Miles 1998) led to increasingly large- scale examination of sites, particularly in the context of gravel extraction, prompted by the publication of Benson and Miles’ (1974) survey of the aerial photographic evidence for the area. While excavation was very largely concentrated in the Thames Valley, however, other work considered wider areas, examining the Upper Thames region as a whole (Hingley 1983) and the vale and downland areas to the south (eg Gaffney and Tingle 1989; Tingle 1991). Since the advent of PPG16 the concentration 1 of excavation in the Valley has been maintained as this continues to be the focal area for development within the county, although a notable exception has been the growing scale of work in the Bicester area, where expansion is also considerable. Apart from this, however, some of the most high profile (though not always high quality) excavation outside the valley has been carried out in the context of research programmes (eg the Hillforts of the Ridgeway project and Eberhard Sauer’s work at Alchester) and of local archaeological initiatives, particularly at Swalcliffe Lea and Wigginton. Both of these traditions are well-established in the county; the former represented principally by the activities over many years of the University Archaeological Society; the latter by a number of local groups, some of considerable longevity and others more ephemeral, while a number of individuals have also instigated fieldwork programmes. The difficulty with all this work is to ensure that resources and expertise are adequate to achieve acceptable post-excavation analysis and reporting. In addition to these traditions, a large number of contracting organisations regularly carry out work within the county. These include Oxford based companies such as Oxford Archaeology and John Moore Heritage Services, ‘regional’ companies such as Cotswold Archaeology and Thames Valley Archaeological Services and contractors based outside the region, including Birmingham Archaeology, Museum of London Archaeological Services, Network Archaeology and Wessex Archaeology among others. The nature of the record The Oxfordshire SMR was a pioneering venture established in 1967, although computerisation came relatively late. This now has a fairly comprehensive record for the Roman period, although there is a modest backlog of data entry, mainly for PPG16 related ‘grey literature’, and the coverage of artefact data is such that systematic recovery of information on particular object types is rarely possible. This is largely a result of the development in recent years of the SMR specifically as a planning rather than a research tool. The SMR contains about 1000 records for Roman ‘monuments’ and ‘buildings’, some of which are components of individual sites. These ‘monuments’ include sites identified only from the air where morphological criteria make a Roman date certain or probable, but some aerial evidence is omitted where dating is less clear (the bias of aerial evidence towards the Thames Valley is well known, but this is exacerbated by the fact that detailed plotting by the NMR has mostly been confined to the valley, although the North Wessex Downs have been covered more recently). ‘Find spots’ of Roman material, having no particular settlement associations, occupy an estimated further 900 records. The distribution of the Roman ‘monuments’ is relatively even across the county (total area c 2605 sq km). Although there is a concentration in the Thames Valley, as would be expected, this is not as marked as might have been anticipated. Relatively thinly covered areas include parts of the Vale of the White Horse, west Oxfordshire away from the river valleys, parts of north-east Oxfordshire around (but excluding) Bicester and the Chiltern scarp. Overall, the county is well-served by the journal Oxoniensia , published annually with a high production standard. South Midlands Archaeology serves as a useful source of short reports and in particular of accounts of work in progress. Many of the larger excavation reports are of such a size, however, that they are not readily covered by these journals. A number of the key excavations of the 1970s were published by the CBA (Parrington 1978; Lambrick and Robinson 1979; Miles 1986) 2 before the establishment of Oxford Archaeology’s ongoing Thames Valley Landscapes and related monograph series and occasional papers, while reports on Wilcote and Aves Ditch have been published by BAR (Hands 1993; 1998; Hands and Cotswold Archaeology 2004; Sauer 2005b) and aspects of recent work at Alchester and elsewhere have been published in national journals (Sauer 2000; 2005a; Gosden and Lock 2003). With this range of publication options a lower proportion of important evidence is consigned wholly to the ‘grey literature’ than might be the case in some other counties. The majority of the numerous reports of this type deal with evaluations and watching briefs having results of minor significance, but a number of more important projects have stalled at this stage. Perhaps the most significant of these is the work carried out in the Oxford pottery industry in and around Minchery Farm (RPS Clouston 1996) - it is unclear if there is any prospect of formal publication of this work. Two major republications should be noted. Young’s 1977 publication of The Roman pottery industry of the Oxford region was reprinted in 2000 in its original form but with the additions of a short introductory essay and a review of post-1977 bibliography pertinent to the industry. In 2005 the various components of the Shakenoak report (Brodribb et al . 1968-1978) were republished in more accessible form as a single BAR volume (395). This involved complete repagination of the original reports, which are otherwise unchanged. All references to Shakenoak below are to the new format (Brodribb et al . 2005). Inheritance There are substantial aspects of continuity in the archaeological record of the late Iron Age and early Roman periods, for which reason no clear distinction is made between them in this survey and a few sites with sequences which perhaps end in the late Iron Age have been included. Both the patterns and character of rural settlement are almost entirely unaffected in the short term by the events of the conquest period. Two of the very few possible exceptions to this are the Bicester sites of Slade Farm (Ellis et al . 2000) and Bicester Fields Farm (Cromarty et al . 1999) where occupation may have ceased at about the time of the conquest. The reasons for the abandonment of these sites are unknown, but they are fairly close to the legionary base at Alchester, so it is possible that the arrival of the army had a direct impact on local settlement patterns, and it may also be no coincidence that this area lay in what was probably the territory of the Catuvellauni, perceived as aggressors against the Dobunni of western Oxfordshire, part of which tribe had entered into a treaty relationship with the Romans at the time of the conquest. Linear earthworks such as Aves Ditch (Sauer 2005b) and the South Oxfordshire Grims Ditch (Cromarty et al .